across the hall from the Professor’s office. It wasn’t so much what the door led to but what it contained.
Boxes, all carefully taped shut and labeled Natasha.
Natasha Walker had been Zora’s mother. A historian, she’d provided the team with period-specific costumes and quizzed them on historical trivia whenever they’d traveled back in time. She also made the world’s best grilled cheese sandwiches and had a weakness for twentieth-century British rock singers (she used to play David Bowie on repeat). But she’d died in the mega-quake, and now all that was left of her were these dusty old boxes.
Most days, Ash pretended the door and the boxes inside didn’t exist. But, today, he and Zora stopped in front of it, preparing.
“You sure you’re okay?” Ash asked.
Zora rolled her eyes, but Ash knew this was a front. The muscles in her shoulders had tensed. If she’d been anyone else, he would’ve done the comforting thing—hand on her shoulder, tight squeeze—but she was Zora, so he just reached past her and opened the door so she wouldn’t have to do it herself.
She released a low exhale, almost a sigh. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.” Ash squinted into the darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust. The closet had an overhead light once, but they didn’t have enough solar panels to keep it working, and the bulb was broken, and, anyway, the boxes were stacked all the way to the ceiling, so it’s not like the light would’ve done them any good. They’d been packed in tight, angled and arranged to fill every spare bit of space.
Natasha, 1920s cocktail dresses, read the label on one. Another said, India, 500 to 600 BCE.
“That’s from when we picked up Chandra, remember?” Ash said, nodding at the box.
Zora didn’t say anything. Ash glanced over in time to see her flick a hand across her cheek, blinking.
He looked away. It seemed wrong to watch her cry.
“I didn’t think it would feel like this,” Zora said. “To see her things . . .”
“We don’t have to do this right now.”
“It’s a masquerade. We need costumes.” Zora cleared her throat and stood up a little straighter. “Let’s take them all.”
They dug the boxes out of the closet and then carried them into the kitchen, where Willis and Chandra were waiting.
Chandra was blinking very quickly. Willis ran his fingers over Natasha’s faded handwriting but said nothing.
Ash’s throat felt tight as he dug through the old clothes. The last time they’d played dress-up like this had been the morning of the earthquake. The Professor had laughed as they’d all tried on loose-fitting T-shirts and faded denim. Roman had pulled on a pair of bell-bottoms and asked Ash what he thought while, behind him, Zora had snorted into her fist. Natasha had joked that none of their hair was the right length to be in fashion.
“Sideburns!” she’d shouted. “No one will believe you’re children of the sixties without sideburns.”
The memory hurt to think about. Ash grabbed one of the Professor’s old suits without looking too closely at it and stalked from the room to get ready alone.
It wasn’t a bad suit, as far as suits went. It was charcoal-colored wool, and closer-fitting than anything he’d ever worn. It looked like it was from the turn of the century, early 2000s, but he’d never been an expert on fashion, so he couldn’t tell for sure. The tie was black silk, and it stubbornly refused his attempts to twist it into something resembling a knot.
Zora appeared behind him, head cocked to the side. “You look alarmingly like my father.”
“I don’t think I ever saw your dad wear anything except for that tweed jacket with the elbow patches.”
“He used to dress up to take my mother out.” Zora touched the sleeve of Ash’s jacket, her expression wistful. “Long time ago.”
Ash pulled the tie apart, again, starting over. His eyes drifted down. Zora wore a floor-length sequined cocktail gown with a plunging neckline. Strands of pearls dripped from her neck.
He whistled through his teeth.
She was holding a mask attached to a long, thin stick in one hand, and she lifted it, hiding her face behind peacock feathers and rhinestones. “You like?”
“I don’t see how you’re going to fix a motor in that getup.”
“It’s possible that the ladies of the 1920s weren’t terribly interested in fixing motors.”
Dorothy would have been twenty-three in 1920, Ash thought. He gritted his teeth, pulling the tie apart a little too violently.
“Stop, you’re going to strangle yourself.” Zora came up behind him and deftly tied